Kids with anxiety can see themselves in this tale and gain hope for recovery.
A girl with anxiety disorder learns how to manage her condition and discovers her skills in this illustrated children’s book.
An unnamed girl has a happy, secure life with her divorced parents, younger brother, and relatives. One day, though, something “terrible and sad” happens, and the girl never sees her auntie again. As a result, the girl becomes “sadder and sadder,” spending more time on her own and rejecting her friends. On top of that, she starts fretting all the time about making mistakes and trying new things; she has nightmares and panic attacks; her joy is lost. Her parents send her to a youth counselor, who recommends writing down worries and putting them in a box—“but the box was never big enough.” The child’s mother helps her winnow down the box of worries, and after a year, the girl starts feeling better and begins noticing her strengths, such as being organized, careful, sensitive, and imaginative. A diagnosis of anxiety disorder helps make sense of her experience, and she rediscovers her joy through helping others and embracing the support of “friends, family, and community.” Weston (The Boy Who Lost His Attention, 2019, etc.), an elementary school teacher with special needs students, explains anxiety disorder in terms children can understand. For example, the girl “worried about getting germs, so she constantly washed her hands over and over again until they bled.” The author’s tone is warm and sympathetic, and in stressing the girl’s talents, or “superpowers,” Weston provides a hopeful outlook. But she goes too far in suggesting that the girl has assets “that other people did not”; surely nonanxious children also can, for example, be “intelligent with an excellent memory.” The box technique seems to be about parental reassurance, but several experts note that reassurance is often ineffective. The book does include some (Canada-centric) basic information and resources on anxiety. The images by debut illustrator Shotton are bare-bones and often pixelated, with the girl far less detailed than her dog, Oliver (the only character with a name).
Kids with anxiety can see themselves in this tale and gain hope for recovery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3932-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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